It has happened before. Apple has released a new product line and the stock price is going down a bit. These days, following the iPad Mini Special Event, the stock price is sinking just like that but a lot more than usual. Mostly, because Apple is sending mixed signals. Sure, the iPad mini is selling like crazy, 3 million units in three days, but that doesn’t count enough. Read more about those signals at Business Insider: Scott Forstall was fired, customers aren’t upgrading as quickly as they used to, Android is vastly outpacing iOS, Apple missed the iPad sales goal and so on and so on. People are leaving Apple products, once a lovebrand, for greener pastures.

The first thing that seems to be on everybody’s mind of course is that Apple without Steve Jobs is losing it. “Maps would never have shipped under Jobs.” “All product lines are now updated at the same time which means there is a 6-9 months window without a big bang.”

Well, this is not going to be a fan boy post, but I don’t see it as black as e.g. Nils Jacobsen writing for Manager Magazin. Yes, FaceTime was probably not the best way to spend money and resources and maps could have used a bit more time (after all, the Google contract was valid for another year). But there is more than the stock market. The company is still growing. The growth trajectory was bound to decrease, this shouldn’t really surprise anybody. Apple is still selling product like crazy, so fast in fact that the manufacturer Foxconn has problems keeping up. And so what if Android is growing faster at the moment, Apple at the moment still has the after sales market meaning the App Store that is generating much more revenue than Google’s Play Store.
Also, I belong to the group of people who thinks that Apple Maps isn’t all that bad. Sure, there seem to be some funny images and parts where the data isn’t as detailed yet, but so far when I was using it: Rock solid and the tin lady giving me directions? Wonderful. Finally hands-free driving again.

But the truth is, there is indeed an empty window coming up. What is Apple going to launch in the next 6 months? I think they have a couple of things on their sleeves. The first guess is the much talked about Apple TV. Will that come? My guess is yes. After the Isaacson Steve Jobs biography quite a few pundits had projected it for February of this year (2012). I think Apple is working on it and with the same intensity and secrecy they were working on the iPhone in 2007.

Secondly, I think Apple’s music offering needs a huge rework and I can imagine they are working on that. Will that be a revolution? There is potential I think. First off iTunes is heavily outdated and no longer adept for the landscape now compared to what it was 10 years ago when it launched. Syncing over several devices, different formats, several accounts, iTunes Match – at the moment this is not a good user experience and if Apple were to reinvent it to the point of “it just works” again you suddenly have a selling point back. In addition, Apple’s status with labels at the moment put it into a great position to solve the streaming business as well. Maybe they buy Pandora or Spotify and enable logging in and payment with Apple credentials.

I have read speculation that Apple would come out with a fitness device but I don’t think so. It’s too small and would undermine the relation with Nike and Nike+. If Apple were to enter the health market they would go bigger. Rather than that I think search and video are two areas where one could look. Google is concentrating on other important areas and has managed to finagle around with their search experience enough so that it is still dominant but not as dominant as it used to be – market share is dropping a bit. Maybe this is a good time to try to make a dent there.

I don’t think that a watch will be the solution, another rumor I have seen. There have been two successful Kickstarter projects in that area and the smartphone has become the watch replacement for many people – I don’t think that the “phone in watch”-product has enough legs to follow in the footsteps of the iPhone.

To conclude I think two things are necessary: Cut the nonessential. Follow out to the Blue Ocean again, get rid of the clutter (like FaceTime, and please let me decide whether I want the stocks app). Secondly, I think they’ll make a big splash. Like buy Square for example. Or, wait for it, the new MySpace if that turns out any good. And thirdly, just one more thing, there will be a new product. But I don’t know what it is yet 😉

While the two cofounders come across as a bit camera shy they made several very interesting points which sound promising.

First, what does the app do? It let’s you capture a moment with a series of pictures. All you have to do is point and click, the rest happens automatically (the picture taking and uploading, you don’t have to name – yet). This happens super fast, and in your stream you can then see what your friends are doing. One fun result is that if two people are using this in the same location, you get a much denser impression of the moment.

In Scoble’s interview one of the founders explained how the other was away for a wedding and he was able to follow the event through Lightt in ca. 45 seconds. Whether you’d want this or the personal account with the 30-minute-photo-presentation is up to you, but the story made me think “Twitter in a visual way” immediately. It’s status updates.

In the future, moments will be able to be categorized for example like “show me all my kid’s birthdays”. The immediate availability in the cloud ads to a better library-option than all the movie files you have on your harddrive and which you never watch.

Sure, this is yet another option to “over-share” (note the satirical underdone) but I am sure that with added privacy settings LIghtt could make as much sense as Path. While apps like Givit, Gifture or Cinemagram focus more on the artsy part of the video Lightt swings for the fences with the social network component (more on mobile video in this blog post).

Obviously, in this early stage there will be few moments from your existing network (especially here in Germany) but if the company can overcome this “small” hurdle, we have a game.

Chances are that Apple won’t approve an app for Google Music as it would directly compete with their on iCloud offering. But the webversion works just fine, no flash, and all the music…

And if you’re wondering, login to Google was easy. Buffering took some time but I have a shitty wi-fi connection. After the load, play was uninterrupted. Worth noting, play continued in the background when I switched to other apps.
Update: I just noticed, you can start and stop the music with the remote of your headphones as well!